December 22, 2005

Chomsky replies in Prospect III

In my article in the November issue of Prospect attacking the choice of Noam Chomsky as the world’s top public intellectual, I wrote (emphasis added):

Chomsky's first book on politics, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) grew from protest against the Vietnam war. But Chomsky went beyond the standard left critique of US imperialism to the belief that "what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification".

In his reply in the new (January 2006) edition of Prospect, Chomsky says:

To demonstrate my "central" doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that, "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent—or denazification."

Here is the actual quotation, from American Power, p. 17 (emphasis added):

We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent – or denazification. The question is a debatable one. Reasonable people may differ. The fact that the question is even debatable is a terrifying thing. To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification.

Chomsky has quoted just the first sentence, to suggest that he left it an open question whether the US needed "dissent or denazification". He asserts that I have misquoted him as opting for "denazification". Yet in the book, only 20-odd words after the sentence he quotes, he does exactly what I say he does, in exactly the words I quoted. He then withholds that information from the editor and readers of Prospect.

So, as Prospect puts it, "the world's top public intellectual responds to accusations of dishonesty". And the way he goes about responding to my accusations of dishonesty is – of all the extraordinary things - to lie about his source material (in this case his own book). Truly, Chomsky is a phenomenon of our age.